Hard Drive Corruption

[jtalka]

Greetings,

I am new to this community and am looking for some help with what has become a recurring problem with my iMac...

I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.3, most up to date version of the OS. I have my hard drive partitioned... The main partition becomes corrupt during normal use... The symptom is that the entire system slows to a crawl.. Doing a disk verify indicates that the file counts are incorrect, usually off by 2... I can boot up with the DVD and run Disk Utility to fix the problem... it will be fine for a day or so and then back to the same place.

I installed Integon anti virus software and full scans show nothing so I have to assume that this is caused by some issue with the OS... My typical workload will be Thunderbird for email, Firefox for browsing and iTunes...

Anyone have any idea what is going on?

Thanks!

[Turboladdade]

You might want to reformat and install your operating system and see if that remedies the problem, but my knee-jerk reaction here is you have a physically damaged hard disk and will need a new one. This is actually an extremely common problem with all computers from all manufacturers - hard drives are the most fragile and prone to failure.

I don't know how you came up with installing anti-virus but that's a complete waste of system resources.

[jtalka]

Thanks for the reply, you are probably correct about the drive... It did come up with a bad sector message a while back.... That got fixed so i thought I was in the clear.

The anti-virus was just process of elimination... I just wanted to make sure that nothing bad was rattling around in there causing the problem. I have Time Capsule so I am covered there... just need to figure out which drive to get and how to pull the old one out.

[Turboladdade]

just need to figure out which drive to get and how to pull the old one out.

And which iMac do you have?

I always recommend Other World Computing for drives and memory.

[chasm]

1. Given that there aren't any Mac viruses, I don't know what you expected an anti-virus program to find.

2. Disk Warrior would probably fix the directory more effectively than Disk Utility, allowing you to safely make a full backup -- but if the problem re-occurs after DW fixes it, then YES you need to replace that hard drive.

[michael13nielsen]

hello,I am also new here.
seems CHASM is right about Disc Warriour.I use Onyx(titanum software)for general cleaning and maintenance.If your
drive is a `smart` drive you get a situation report that indicates the drives state.Which Mac do run?

[mark_42]

I second both the recommendations for Disk Warrior and Other World Computing.

Disk Warrior has cured problems that other software (most notably TechTool Pro) couldn't. Ive been using it since System 7.something and It's the only disk repair and recovery utility that has my complete confidence. If Disk Warrior can't fix it, it can't be fixed.

I've been using Other World Computing for many years for external drives. They have top quality cases using high quality chip sets and have great customer support. If you're buying a bare drive from them, it's my opinion that you should avoid Seagate. The majority of drive failures that I've seen have been Seagates.

[mark_42]

Jtalka, if you need to replace the drive, check ifixit.com for detailed instructions with pictures. That site has been a lifesaver for me. I used it to help me swap out the drives in four Mac laptops going back to an old iBook G3.

The nice thing about the iMac is that it uses 3.5" drives which are a lot less expensive than the 2.5" laptop drives. Heck, the WD Caviar Green 2TB is only $140 at OWC!